September 11: Year In Review 2001

For years we said we lived in a global village. On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists bent on wreaking havoc in New York City and Washington, D.C., proved that this was so. Never before had the world so intimately shared the same tragic disaster. Because the attacks occurred in the morning on the U.S. East Coast, perhaps 90% of the Earth’s population was awake when two airplanes flew into the World Trade Center and another crashed into the Pentagon. Transported to New York by some of the most powerful images ever conveyed by television, billions of people vicariously experienced the horror. (For flight paths of the planes, seeMap.)

Rare are the events that jolt the entire globe. In truth, there may never have been another that had the impact of September 11. The detonation of the first atomic bomb or the bringing down of the Berlin Wall may have been more important historical events, but neither had an audience as big or as raptly attentive as that on September 11. In part because nearly everyone was jolted, we will need a long time to grasp the true import of that date. It became a cliché almost immediately afterward that “everything has changed.” Giving that phrase real content will take years.

Some of the things that changed were quickly obvious. The United States lost its innocence and its isolation, becoming in just a few days a different kind of global power. For 56 years after World War II, Americans had policed the globe as beneficent gendarmes, trying to keep the world safe for democracy and capitalism. Suddenly on September 11 the mission changed. The goal became to keep America itself safe.

For the first time, other nations rushed to America’s side, offering condolences and active assistance. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked Article 5 of its founding treaty, declaring that the terrorist actions constituted an attack against all NATO members, which would respond—as required by the treaty—as if they had been attacked themselves. Article 5 had never before been invoked. In Moscow the young president of Russia phoned the young U.S. president aboard Air Force One and pledged his country’s cooperation for a war against terrorism. Vladimir Putin’s call was the first the administration of George W. Bush received from a foreign leader. On September 19 the Organization of American States agreed by acclamation to invoke the Rio Treaty, a mutual defense pact. One after another the countries of the world lined up with the United States. Most did so without evident hesitation, a few because Bush made it so clear, in his speech to Congress on September 20, that the U.S. expected their support: “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

Ultimately, only Iraq offered sympathy to the terrorists; no other government would take their side. This was a huge change. The nations of the world had never before been so united on an important global issue. The collapse of international factions into a united front against terrorism signaled powerfully that, as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell put it in a speech in Shanghai on October 18, “not only is the Cold War over, the post-Cold War period is also over.” Suddenly the world had a new cause and a new sense of shared challenge. Old alignments seemed to disappear.

But that near unanimity among political leaders was not so evident on the streets of the world’s cities, towns, and villages. Within hours of the September 11 attacks, cameras caught Palestinians on the West Bank exulting over the terrorists’ successes. Posters carrying the likeness of Osama bin Laden blossomed throughout the Muslim world. Public opinion polls and questioning reporters found that citizens of many lands felt sympathy for the terrorists and antipathy for the United States.

In China government officials had to censor Internet discussions, which included much cheering for a blow struck against American arrogance. A poll taken in Bolivia found that Bin Laden was the most admired man in that Andean nation. In Muslim countries certain myths took hold: that it was not the Arabs on board who hijacked the aircraft and flew them into the Pentagon and the WTC but, in fact, Israeli intelligence agents who were responsible for the attacks; that the Americans had no proof that Bin Laden was behind what had happened. One of the ugliest myths, written and repeated time and again in the Arab world, was that several thousand Jews who ordinarily worked in the World Trade Center did not show up for work on September 11—an implication that they had been warned of the attacks. In fact, many of the nearly 3,000 victims in the World Trade Center were Jewish.

These expressions of hostility toward the United States and sympathy for those who killed so many innocent people shocked and alarmed many Americans, who wondered how foreigners could wish them ill. Americans hold their country in a high regard, and many did not realize how ambivalent others could be in their attitudes toward the world’s only superpower. Anti-Americanism was nothing new, of course, but this latest strain had special characteristics related to America’s overwhelming power and the way it had been used and perceived through the 1990s.

Before September 11, Americans had clearly grown comfortable with their cushy position, above the world’s frays. Americans liked being richer than the rest and well insulated from their tribulations. In 2001 the new U.S. administration was becoming famous for a go-it-alone approach to international affairs, infuriating allies and rivals by its unilateral policies and decisions and by its reluctance to join other nations in collective action. One example was the international effort to do something about global warming by controlling the emissions of “greenhouse gases,” especially the carbon monoxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels. On September 11 the international community was preparing for a conference that would complete a final agreement on emissions controls, but the United States, the producer of one-fourth of the world’s greenhouse gases, had opted not to participate.

On those occasions when the United States did play an active part in world affairs and did join other countries in some collaborative efforts, it was usually on its own terms. Many Americans considered this reasonable and appropriate. Why should they give others any influence over matters they wanted to, and could, control themselves?

September 11 created a new reality. Beginning with that communication from Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin, President Bush spent most of the first days after the attacks speaking and meeting with foreign leaders, building what he called a new global coalition against terrorism. “We will rally the world,” Bush said, and he did just that. A president regarded warily by many world leaders as a unilateralist and a bit of a cowboy was suddenly courting support from every conceivable precinct. On September 24 the House of Representatives voted to release $582 million of the $819 million in back dues to the United Nations. Concerns that just before September 11 dominated American policy suddenly disappeared. So, for example, Uzbekistan, with its corrupt and authoritarian regime that had been held at arm’s length by the United States before September 11, became an important ally and a base for American military operations soon afterward.

“Working well with others” became a category on school report cards in the U.S. in the last generation, but globally, this had not been an American value. George Washington, the founding father, offered his countrymen the vision of a United States totally insulated from foreign entanglements in his famous Farewell Address 205 years before September 11, and that remained a tantalizing goal for many Americans. Washington, of course, could not have imagined the technological changes that would shrink the world in our time. Even Americans who experienced those changes remained reluctant to accept their true implications.

September 11 ended the dream of “fortress America.” The 19 Arab terrorists who hijacked four airliners that day obviously were not restrained by any sense that the United States enjoyed special protection from hostile foreign forces. The shock that went through the American population after September 11, all but eliminating air travel and tourism for weeks, also marked a turning point for the American experiment, though it was impossible to explain just how. That might take years to clarify.

The horror planned for September 11 was supposed to be worse, and very nearly was. The fourth hijacked airplane was evidently aimed at the Capitol or the White House in Washington—we may never know its target for certain. A direct hit on either would have been symbolically devastating, adding enormously to the impact of the attacks. But a group of brave and resourceful passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 prevented its hijackers from fulfilling their mission, forcing the plane down in a Pennsylvania farm field, where the lives of everyone on board ended.

The fate of Flight 93 was a demonstration of how the modern global village can function. Passengers on board the flight, who thought they were flying from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco, made calls to relatives on the ground with cellular telephones and learned that a hijacked plane already had been flown into the World Trade Center in New York. One of them was Jeremy Glick, 31, sales manager for a technology firm, who told his wife to “have a good life” and promised to go down fighting against the terrorists. Glick and several other passengers, all apparently held in the galley at the rear of the Boeing 757, were plotting to rush the cockpit of the plane, 110 feet forward of the galley, to disrupt whatever plan their hijackers had in mind. One of the other plotters, Todd Beamer, told a telephone operator whom he had reached via an onboard “airfone” about this plan. The operator heard him shout to his comrades, “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll!” The operator then heard screams and sounds of a scuffle before the line went dead. In the next few moments, the plane took a series of sharp turns and then plunged into the Pennsylvania countryside near the town of Shanksville, just south of Johnstown. Somehow, the passengers had disrupted the hijackers and forced the plane to Earth.

In that case the technological wizardry of the age contributed to heroism and a self-sacrifice that may have saved many lives in Washington. This was one example of how the events of September 11 were made possible by modern technology or modern styles of life. Other examples of the same phenomenon were not so uplifting.

Eerily, the terrorists, avowed enemies of secular modernity, were able to have the enormous impact they had by mastering skills and technologies that were part of what they claimed to detest. Their ability to move freely between their countries of origin, principally Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and the flying schools and Internet cafés of the United States they so ardently hated, and then into the cockpits of those four Boeing jetliners, was perhaps the most powerful symbol of what September 11 really represented—on one hand, angry young Arabs who belonged to a movement dedicated to antimodernism and an anti-American crusade; on the other hand, a hypermodern America open to the world, open even to these fanatics who were determined to inflict great harm on the United States. In an age of irony, this ultimate irony: the terrorists could do the damage they did only by acquiring skills from American flying schools, exploiting America’s porous airport-security arrangements, and mastering the arts of hiding in plain sight in a society they abhorred. In the real global village of 2001, we were all startled to discover, such trickery was amazingly simple. On September 10, it soon became clear, we had not understood the world we lived in; a month later we understood it a lot better, though far from thoroughly.

The easy, comforting notion of a global village implies that all the world’s peoples are intimate neighbours, sharing more than they do not share. But this is not the global village that September 11 revealed so starkly.

In the real modern world, different peoples have taken what are sometimes radically different paths and reached very different destinations. In Europe and North America, where technology, education, and tradition produced the greatest wealth, the failure of the Muslim world to match this prosperity was just a fact of modern life, little remarked upon before September 11. Most Muslims lived in relative poverty; some were rich from oil; and almost none, rich or poor, occupied the most modern precincts of the global village. The most modern and successful nation in the Middle East, the centre of the Muslim world, was not Muslim at all: Israel. But Israel was a hated symbol to many of its Arab neighbours.

The gulf that divides Muslim, mostly Arab peoples from Europeans and Americans, and also Asians, may be the most significant dividing line in the 21st-century world. Put simply, the secular global economy created by the richer countries gave great benefit to many and was a model to be emulated for many more. South Koreans, Chinese, Cypriots, and Chileans all subscribed to the same broad propositions that animated Americans, Germans, and Japanese: technological progress is good; wealth earned from global trade is desirable; consumerism and the democratization of wealth are goals to be pursued. For most of the adherents of this loose creed, political democracy was also part of the formula—democratic governments, most agreed, were most likely to achieve the prosperity so many were seeking.

Many Muslims and Arabs embraced the rich world’s ideals—this is evident from the fact that millions of them have found ways to establish residency in rich countries and pursue new lives in them. The governments and especially the religious establishments of the Arab world, however, were not part of the fledgling consensus joined by so many other nations. No Arab government was a democracy, and no Arab nation was a full participant in the technological revolution of the age. Only a few oil-rich autocracies even took a stab at participation.

The Muslim world has never experienced anything comparable to the enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries that prepared the Christian nations of Europe for the Industrial Revolution and modernity. For Muslim fundamentalists—for example, the Wahhabi sect that dominates the religious life of Saudi Arabia—nonparticipation in the modern world is seen as a good thing, a way to avoid pollution of Muslim values by infidels. But such fundamentalists are surrounded by the temptations of the wealthy world, and often by neighbours in their own countries who do not share their disdain for modernity. Tens of thousands of well-to-do Saudis, for example, own houses or apartments in Europe or the United States and happily partake of modern pleasures when visiting those places. Yet at home they support a system that denies such pleasures to most of their countrymen and provides few opportunities for citizens to express themselves or influence their government.

The Arab world differs from the modernized West and Asia in another important respect. When countries get rich, their birthrates decline. Birthrates are so low in the developed European nations that they are all facing shrinkage of their native populations. Japan is in a similar position. Conversely, the Arab countries are experiencing rapid population growth. Saudi Arabia is growing more than 3% a year; Egypt, about 2%. Burgeoning populations aggravate tensions in these societies, none of which is creating opportunities for young people sufficient to satisfy the growing number of working-age citizens.

All of these factors are related to the success Bin Laden and his allies have had in building the al-Qaeda terrorist movement that shook the world on September 11. Obviously, only a tiny fraction of the young men of the Arab and Muslim worlds joined al-Qaeda and other like-minded groups. Might there be many more in the future? The possibility could not be dismissed lightly after September 11.

Americans took comfort from their own response to September 11. The country found many heroes to thank, from those passengers on Flight 93 to the fire fighters and police officers of New York City, so many of whom gave their lives that day in service to their country and community. Americans poured hundreds of millions of dollars into charities to support the victims’ families and stoically put up with the practical consequences of the attacks, which included a sharp economic downturn, closures and postponements of various meetings and events, and total disruption of domestic airline travel in the United States. Countless Americans remarked on a new mood in the country, a new spirit of cooperation and sharing, and a new recognition, as many put it, of what “really matters” in their lives.

At year’s end it was still too early to know the more profound impact of September 11 and its aftermath. Would Americans’ lost innocence be translated into a real commitment to confronting the underlying problems confronting the global village? Or would a quick war on terrorism be followed by a relapse into American exceptionalism and another retreat from international engagement? The terrorists of September 11 challenged the United States to confront the fact that it overwhelms all other nations in its wealth, power, and influence and to accept the responsibilities that accompany such preponderance. The terrorists succeeded in making America the target. Americans would have to choose a response to that new status.

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